Man's dwelling place - short story - Latin America: Private Eyes & Time Travelers

Literary Review, Fall, 1994 by Angelica Gorodischer, Alberto Manguel

WE ENTERED THE CITY at 8:30 A.M. local time. I must bring to Your Lordship's attention the fact that the members of the crew under my command seemed uneasy, almost frightened. At the time I attributed their condition to the peace and quiet--I don't think I was mistaken. It was a clear day, the weather was mild, and the sun, the breeze and the grasshoppers made us think of a fairly advanced spring.

Our heavy clothing bothered us, leather hems dug into our flesh and I'm certain that all of us would have preferred to wear the sandals we kept on board ship and not the regulation disembarkment boots. The streets were lined with fruit-laden trees, fruit that looked still green, a whitish or yellowish green, cold, but which seemed to mellow, turn golden, before our very eyes. In the official report I have detailed the itinerary we followed. Your Lordship will find marked in red upon the map hereby enclosed, the various houses we entered. They were all uninhabited. Furnished, ready to be lived in, with flowers in vases, breakfasts on the tables, curtains floating in the breeze--but empty. They all looked clean and fresh, their windows open onto the green gardens--but empty. The streets were also empty. In the official report I have tried to be as objective as possible, as if this mission were no different from any of the previous ones. But here I wish to give Your Lordship some idea of what we felt, the crew and myself, as we entered the empty city; and later, when we saw the city's inhabitants. I don't think I know how to use emotional language, so I must return again and again to the clinical description of what we saw. Your Lordship will excuse the repetitions, which are perhaps useless. Leaving the sixth house (in which we had seen camp-beds, mirrors, a round wooden table with a yellow tablecloth, white cups, a bird in a cage, recently-watered plants, an open awning over a deck) one of the men suggested we turn back. I didn't consider his suggestion a breach of discipline; I put my right hand on the butt of my gun (my gun is always unloaded; I have never fired against anyone and I would not have fired against him, but I could have arrested him and left him in solitary confinement on board ship) and told him to stay exactly where he was, while I and the others carried on into the heart of the city. I do not know what my men were thinking; I could sense their fear but not read their thoughts. For my part, I could not stop remembering our grey cities, the factory chimneys, the slums, the lack of trees and green places, the metallic smells, the skyscrapers, the windy corners on cold afternoons, the mad traffic, the dirt, the noise. Here was a happy, golden city, golden and green, green and peaceful. Its inhabitants had just died, or were invisible. But I wished I could have been born here, grow up here, live and die in a city like this. There were no cars, the roads were softly curved, the streets were not really streets: they were walks, country walks through gardens; the houses were low and white, one for each family, with a fenceless yard, with trees. There were no tall buildings, no commercial or industrial areas, no civic centres, no temples. As soon as I realized that the whole city had been built as a home, a place to live in, I stopped being afraid. I confess, Your Lordship, after so many years, that I have felt fear several times, but I have always been able to free myself from fear through sheer willpower. But not this time. Fear had gripped hold of me from the moment I realized (thinking it was true) that the city was uninhabited but alive; and hten fear left me, without even having to think about it, helplessly. It left me when I felt that here at last was man's dwelling-place, and I longed to sit on the ground in the shadow of a large tree, then enter one of the houses, eat the hurried, voracious breakfast of youth, lie on one of the beds full of the nodding weariness of old age. I thought of nests, hide-aways, caves, sailing ships, apartment houses, carpeted offices, clandestine brothels, all that man has invented to protect himself from the outside world, to hide himself from the eyes of others, to exorcise his miseries, to try and prove that he is alive--and the thought somehow explained the disappearance of my fear. At this point I wish to inform Your Lordship of what we learnt later from the inhabitants of the city. (This has been explained in more technical terms in the report drafted by the mission's engineer who made a careful study of the structures.) The houses had been functioning on their own for a very long time--for many years, many generations. Their mechanisms keep them alive, clean them, close the windows when it rains, light the fires when it is cold, change the bed linen, dish out the breakfasts and lunches, prepare fresh lemonade in summer and rum-punch in winter. But we, who do not have living houses, houses with hands and brains, imagined that their inhabitants had just abandoned them. At last we reached the central square. I call it "square" (as I did in the report) in the hope of making myself understood. It was not a dry stone square with cement borders and monuments and shrivelled moss sprouting from its cracks; neither was it a park with flower-beds and rose-bushes and pergolas. It was the land, I imagine, man discovered when he stopped being a nomad and a hunter; when he stopped in his tracks and instead of pitching a tent, built a house; when he harnessed his horse to a plough instead of holding it ready to ride away. It was a rippling field surrounded by the city, green, with trees and a very narrow river. The inhabitants of the city were there. They lay on the green, eyes wide open, their hair mingling with the grass. And the breeze blew their clothing, the breeze moved through the trees and lifted their tunics, making their ribbons and tresses float in the air. They were not dead, they were breathing. We walked among them, we called to them, we bent over them shading their open eyes from the sun, trying to make them see us. Your Lordship has read the report, so I will not repeat myself. I will not describe yet again our efforts to communicate with them, nor the ritual of sounds and gestures that some of them performed before speaking to us. I remember I leaned over a cross-eyed woman who was telling me about their waiting, while a few of my men, on their hands and knees, were calling me over to the bodies lying face upwards, to listen to the words of the citizens of the golden city I now longed for, had always longed for, had ventured through to reach these immortal chrysalids. I told my men to write everything down, carefully, and then settled down to listen, but the woman was no longer talking. I had to start again, this time with a young boy who could have been my son, even my grandson, and for whom I felt not pity but violent envious hatred. The cross-eyed woman had opened her mouth and shut it again, like a fish, seven times, and had waited for a cloud to pass over a tree behind her head, and had blown her breath into my face: that was the only way, she later said, for her to be able to speak to a stranger. Had she wanted to speak to one of the other creatures lying there, the series of signs, signals and sounds would have been different, and she would have had to wait in turn, before receiving an answer, for the chain of seemingly senseless codes that the unlimited space had prompted them to invent. With the young boy I was more patient and less afraid. His rhythm of life depended on the signals he received, but he constantly doubted the meaning of these signals, and speaking to me caused him such unease that in the end he sank deeply into a kind of coma. He never spoke to the others, but I was something so out of the ordinary, that he felt he could wager with a large margin of certainty on the possibility of my being, I myself, a favourable omen. The signs and messages reached him both from the outside world and from within himself; and for him, the first interpretation he made of them was the only valid and true one. But then a second meaning formed itself in his mind, a meaning that might be either a deceitful version, or the true one, hidden and delayed by the first. Because of this doubt he would hesitate to believe his first interpretation. All this would condition all future actions--actions never to be carried out--because he kept looking for new facts to confirm and help interpret all the previously acquired information. I left him and ordered our retreat after checking to see what our crew had been able to obtain. I felt a growing hostility towards these quiet people, and I also felt furious with myself because of my inefficiency. I kept telling myself I should have stopped here to find at least one who would stand out among the young motionless bodies, their beautiful open eyes, the floating gauze, the fallen hands. Now I realize that I was looking for an image of Your Lordship: a leader, a wise old man, a commander of the people. But there was none, and I ask myself: had there been one, would they all have lain down there to live mingled with the grass, one with the earth, deep in their own unchangeable belief, each waiting calmly for death, looked after by the electronic houses, nourished, dressed, fertilized, combed, perfumed, shod by cybernetic constructions guarded by their own cyclops' nests? The answer is yes, and Your Lordship will now understand the conclusions of my report. I believe that we, the descendants of those who left our planet convinced of its destruction, should not return home. It is true: mankind did not destroy itself. It reached happiness, balance, perfection. Mankind built golden cities on which they bestowed hands and eyes, eliminating, as worthless, work and money. But we, who live in murky towns of constant turmoil, we who travel and toil and make love and commit suicide and betray each other and drive noisy, dangerous vehicles, we, the younger brothers of Man, should not return. For us Paradise is irretrievably lost, and it is better that way: now we belong only to ourselves. I, a pacifist, a disciple of Your Lordship, a speaker for nonviolence, am here defending war, killings, tortures. I say that I myself will kill, fire guns, drop bombs, destroy and torture, if thereby I will avoid lying on the grass waiting for death, unravelling a useless ritual that will not even allow me to know whether I am alive or dead, permitting myself to be dressed, washed, combed, my semen extracted to fertilize women I cannot see, protected from the rain, fed, looked after. My opinion--even though I remember with pain the golden, motionless, empty city--is that the results of this expedition to the third planet from the Sun should not be made public. I cannot end this personal letter to Your Lordship without mentioning that the city had a name full of promise, transparent and lofty, that does not appear in the official report, and that the mothering river that crossed the garden looked as silver-plated as its name, beneath the midday sun, the day we left.